Descendants of slaves owned by Jesuits wrestle with their legacy

Theresa Payne and her daughter Kathleen Payne-Wilks, seen at left, are descendants of the 272 slaves owned by the Jesuits of Georgetown University, and who were sold to plantations in Louisiana in the 1830s.

Theresa Payne, 84, a parishioner at St. Vincent de Paul Church in Nashville, grew up in the small Louisiana town of Maringouin, just west of Baton Rouge.

She was one of Ben and Eleanor Hicks Poole’s 19 children, and they all worked on her grandfather’s farm. “We picked cotton, we cut sugar cane,” Payne said. “I couldn’t have been more than 7 or 8.”

“We were anxious to get away from Maringouin because Maringouin wasn’t anything,” said Payne, who moved to Baton Rouge, St. Louis and Racine, Wisconsin, before settling in Nashville with her late husband, Robert Payne.

After he died in 1979, she had a long career as a nurse for the Metro Department of Health and raised her daughter, Kathleen, as a single mother.

Payne knew she was the granddaughter of former slaves, but her understanding of her family history didn’t reach any further back than Maringouin.

That changed when the New York Times published an article about how Georgetown University and the Jesuits who founded it were coming to terms with their history with slavery.

In 1838, the Jesuit priests of Maryland sold 272 enslaved men, women and children they owned to keep the struggling college in Washington, D.C., afloat financially. Among the 272, who were shipped to plantations in Louisiana, were Payne’s ancestors.

“I never knew anything about it,” Payne said.

Initially, the reaction from Payne’s family and the thousands of descendants of what is now known as the GU272 all across the country, was shock.

St. Vincent de Paul parishioner, Theresa Payne, above, seated, receives a blessing from Bishop Fernand Cheri, Auxiliary Bishop of New Orleans, during his 2017 visit to St. Vincent, where he previously served as pastor. Payne’s daughter, Kathleen Payne-Wilks, stands behind her mother at right. Tennessee Register file photo by Andy Telli

But the shock quickly morphed into anger. “I was immediately furious,” Payne-Wilks said.

“I had been raised Catholic. My mom had been raised Catholic. The whole family for the most part was Catholic,” she said. To find out that Catholic priests had owned her ancestors as slaves and then sold them, “I felt totally betrayed.”

‘Looking for a hand up’

The Jesuits had come to Maryland in the 1630s among the first English Catholics to settle in the colony. They owned slaves to work on the plantation they owned in Maryland, which provided revenue that supported Georgetown College in Washington, which was founded in 1789.

By the 1830s, the college was struggling financially and the Jesuits’ plantation was no longer profitable. The Jesuits decided to sell nearly all of their slaves to pay off the college’s debts. The sale price was nearly $3.3 million in today’s dollars.

There was disagreement among the Jesuits, some of whom feared their slaves would not be allowed to continue practicing their Catholic faith. They also knew life on the plantations of the Deep South were notoriously brutal.

Leaders of the Jesuit order in Rome were initially reluctant to authorize the sale, but eventually were convinced to reconsider.

The 272 slaves were sent on ships to Louisiana, where many were sold to the owners of plantations near Maringouin.

In 2015, responding to student protests, Georgetown, which today is one of the most elite universities in the country, formed a working committee to examine the school’s history with slavery and make recommendations of how to move forward.

A year later, Georgetown announced it would rename one of the buildings on campus in honor of one of the 272, Isaac Hawkins, create an institute to study slavery, and offer preferential admissions into Georgetown for any of the descendants who qualify.

“That’s a good start,” said Payne-Wilks. But she, like many of the GU272 descendants, believe Georgetown should do much more.

“If there had not been the 272, there would not be a Georgetown,” she said. “My family, blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh, were sold to keep Georgetown from bankruptcy. There was no remuneration for them. The college received remuneration for losing their slave labor. The people never received anything.”

“I don’t think people are looking for a handout, they’re looking for a hand up,” Payne-Wilks said. “Our ancestors already paid for it with slavery.”

‘Something really, really big’

Georgetown offered legacy status to the descendants in the admissions process. That means they would receive the same advantages as the children of faculty members and alumni.

But only a limited number of people would qualify for the offer, said Payne-Wilks, who noted that only 3,300 of the more than 21,000 people who applied to Georgetown for the Class of 2021 were accepted.

“I worked my whole life to make sure my daughter was prepared,” Payne-Wilks said of her daughter Inaya, who is a sophomore at Williams College, one of the nation’s top liberal arts colleges. But not all descendants are as prepared for Georgetown as her daughter, she said.

“How can you offer them an opportunity to go to Georgetown without figuring out a way to make that happen?” she asked.

Payne-Wilks, who belongs to the Legacy of the GU272 Alliance, one of several descendant groups that has been formed, would like to see Georgetown invite children of the descendants to campus for a summer program to teach them about their history and to offer classes to prepare them for college.

“Give them a real shot to go to Georgetown,” Payne-Wilks said. “That would be a step in a right direction for reconciliation.”

She and other descendants would like to see Georgetown offer to pay the tuition of descendants at other colleges. “Not everybody wants to go to Georgetown,” Payne-Wilks said.

But scholarships and tuitions would only help some of the descendants, Payne-Wilks said. She would like to see Georgetown, which has an endowment of $1.484 billion, look for ways to offer other kinds of help.

“It has to be something everyone can have,” whether it’s education, health care, or a life insurance policy for every descendant, Payne-Wilks said. “They could do something really, really big to make some changes to people … who 200 years ago that opportunity was taken away.”

‘A moral compass’

The Jesuits, formally known at the Society of Jesus, and the GU272 Descendants Association recently organized listening sessions. The Jesuits were represented by Father Tim Kesicki, president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, and Father Bob Hussey, provincial of the Maryland Province.

At a New Orleans listening session in January, Father Kesicki said the listening sessions with the Louisiana descendants of those who were enslaved were just the beginning of a lengthy dialogue process, “one of many visits moving forward.”

“As Jesuits, we have greatly sinned, in what we have done and in what we have failed to do. Father Hussey and I are here today because we are profoundly sorry,” Father Kesicki said.

“We share a history – a history that is the history of slavery,” Father Hussey added. “Jesuits in my province almost 200 years ago owned and sold enslaved people, and they were your ancestors, your family. It is hard for me to say that, but it is the truth, and we need to continue to face that truth.”

“The history we share is painful,” Father Hussey said. “It is painful to remember the denial of human dignity and the suffering of slavery, imagining what your ancestors must have known. It is painful for us as Jesuits to recognize that our brothers, in blindness, would treat people in a way so contrary to the values we profess. We are all deeply ashamed by that.”

Father Kesicki and Father Hussey said the Jesuits and the GU272 are working on a process for future dialogue and consensus.

“This is a long time coming, and it’s a long road ahead,” Father Kesicki said. “I hope that we don’t wait until we’ve agreed on everything before we do anything.”

“There is a moral and ethical choice to be made,” Payne-Wilks said. “What I need is for them to understand that because of the things that they did, African Americans in this country were not considered human. … They were without basic human rights, without dignity … probably with not a lot of hope.”

The harm caused by slavery persists for African-Americans even to this day, Payne-Wilks said.

But Georgetown could serve as a model for the rest of the country about how to pursue reconciliation, Payne-Wilks said. “Georgetown can open up a moral compass to give other people an idea of what is moral, what is right.”